You’ll Never Get Rich (1941)

Given that You’ll Never Get Rich, released by Columbia in 1941, was the first movie that teamed Fred Astaire with Rita Hayworth and that it was the movie that made her a star I was looking forward to watching it. In fact it turned out to be a huge disappointment for a variety of reasons.

Robert Curtis (Fred Astaire) is producing a Broadway show. Sheila Winthrop (Rita Hayworth) is one of the chorus girls. The owner of the theatre, Martin Cortland (Robert Benchley), is pursuing Sheila while trying not to let his wife find out about it. He tries to cover his tracks by making it appear that Robert is the one pursuing her. Both Robert and Sheila realise they’re being manipulated and they’re soon at odds with each other.

The first time Rita Hayworth appears on the screen we’re knocked out by her star quality, her beauty, her charm and her wit.

So at this early stage the movie looks like it’s going to be a fine breezy musical romance.

Then it becomes a totally different movie. It becomes a service comedy, and there is no species of movie I dislike more than service comedies. This was 1941, America was not yet in the war but Hollywood had worked itself up into a war frenzy which presumably explains why we get to see Fred Astaire in uniform and most of the film takes place on an army base. War was coming (or at least that’s what Hollywood hoped) and it was going to be so much fun.

It’s not just a service comedy, it’s a lame service comedy. The comedy is not just feeble it’s excruciating.

Inevitably this switch means that Rita Hayworth gets nowhere near as much screen time as she should get. She gets few opportunities to dance with Astaire and they have only one great dance together. This is a problem since Hayworth is the best thing in the movie. In fact she’s the only good thing in the movie.

You’ll Never Get Rich is in black-and-white. That’s OK, I love black-and-white movies. But the 1930s RKO Astaire Rogers movies had exquisite black-and-white cinematography and stunning sets. You’ll Never Get Rich has dreary black-and-white cinematography and boring ugly sets.

Even the costumes are dull, apart from one really nice dress won by Hayworth. But she should have been put in lots of gorgeous dresses.

It has a score by Cole Porter (something which should be a major asset) but it’s an entirely forgettable score.

The screenplay, by Michael Fessier and Ernest Paganoin, is feeble. The service comedy plot is the film’s major plot strand and it should have been ditched in its entirety. The love story between Fred and Rita is relegated to being a minor subplot when in fact it should he been the whole movie. The entire script should have been thrown in the trash can and decent writers hired to write a new one.

Director Sidney Lanfield’s efforts are barely competent.

Hayworth is great but Astaire is all at sea with material that doesn’t suit him at all. Robert Benchley is a lot of fun as the inept philanderer. The other members of the supporting cast are either unmemorable or irritating.

I hate to say this but this is a terrible movie. Unless you’re a Rita Hayworth completist it’s not worth bothering with.

The second (and final) Astaire-Hayworth musical, You Were Never Lovelier, is much much better. In fact it’s terrific.

Music in My Heart (1940)

Music in My Heart is a 1940 Columbia musical. Rita Hayworth is the female lead but this is pre-stardom Rita Hayworth. This is Rita on the cusp of stardom. When you watch this movie you can tell that it was just a matter of time. The star quality is there.

Tony Martin plays Robert Gregory, almost a musical comedy star. He is at least the understudy to the star. Now he finally gets to play the lead, but his visa has expired and he’s about to be kicked out of the country.

He’s on the way to the pier to board his ship when his cab crashes into a cab containing Patricia O'Malley (Rita Hayworth). She needs to get to the ship as well. Her husband-to-be Charles Spencer Gardner III (Alan Mowbray) is awaiting her. He’s a millionaire. She is pretty pleased with herself for snaring a rich husband.

They both miss the boat, literally. Now Robert has the cops after him and Patricia has missed out on her rich husband.

Of course they’re going to fall in love and have impossible obstacles to surmount.

Gardner’s manservant Griggs (Eric Blore) is plotting to bring his master and Patricia back together.

Patricia’s kid sister Mary (Edith Fellows) is plotting to bring his master and Robert together.

Patricia lives in a rooming house. On the ground floor is a restaurant run by Sascha (George Tobias), a crazy White Russian who is planning to restore the Romanovs, and a penniless Italian. They’re about to be evicted. They can’t pay their rent.

The plot is standard romantic farce and it works perfectly well.

Eric Blore is alway a joy to watch.

With Rita Hayworth not yet a star this movie was conceived as a star vehicle for Tony Martin. He’s OK but he doesn’t quite have the necessary charm or charisma.

Rita gets plenty of screen time, she really is the female lead, but musically the movie is built around Tony Martin’s singing rather than Hayworth’s dancing. Had the movie been made a year later the balance would obviously have been reversed.

While Rita gets very little dancing to do she gets plenty of opportunities to demonstrate her comic talents and her potential as one of the great romantic stars. She outshines her leading man Tony Martin to an embarrassing degree.

Andre Kostelanetz and His Orchestra are heavily featured. They would become hugely popular on record in the 50s and it’s perhaps surprising that they didn’t feature in more movies. Chet Forrest and Bob Wright wrote the songs one of which, It’s A Blue World, was a reasonably big hit for Tony Martin.

Joseph Santley had a long and prolific career as a director without ever attracting much attention. He does a competent job here.

The one big big problem is that Columbia knew they had a future star in Rita Hayworth but hadn’t yet figured out what kind of star and hadn’t realised that it might be a good idea to give the kid plenty of chances to do some serious dancing. That’s all that’s missing here. If they’d added a couple of dances for Rita it could have been a huge hit.

As it stands it’s still quite entertaining. It’s so fluffy and lightweight that the slightest breeze would waft it away but it’s amusing and likeable. A must for Rita Hayworth fans. Highly recommended.

You Were Never Lovelier (1942)

You Were Never Lovelier is a 1942 musical starring Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. It includes absolutely every ingredient you could ask for in a bubbly musical romance.

Robert Davis (Fred Astaire) is a famed New York dance star and he’s in Buenos Aires and he’s just lost his last dollar at the racetrack. He needs a job pronto. He figures he can talk his way into a dancing gig at the Sky Room, the swankiest night spot in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately the Sky Room is owned by the irascible Eduardo Acuña (Adolphe Menjou) who takes an instant dislike to the New Yorker. But then Acuña doesn’t get along with anybody.

Acuña has his own problem. He has four daughters. They’re lovely girls but family tradition demands that they should get married in birth order. The oldest has just been married. That means it’s the turn of Maria (Rita Hayworth). And Maria isn’t interested in marriage.

Maria has the reputation of being an ice queen. The truth is the exact opposite. She’s a wildly romantic girl. That’s why she hasn’t fallen in love. She is waiting for a dashing man to sweep her off her feet.

Acuña has cooked up a crazy scheme to make Maria think she has a secret admirer. To his horror Maria gets the idea that Robert Davis is her secret admirer. Acuña thinks Davis is a scoundrel.

All the expected romantic complications and misunderstandings ensue. Robert did not expect to fall in love with the girl.

And those complications are handled skilfully and wittily and charmingly by the script.

Adolphe Menjou is delightfully scheming and cantankerous. He’s not villainous. He’s just used to getting his own way and thinks he can manipulate his daughter because he thinks that he understands how to handle women. In his own way he means well but he creates emotional chaos.

Fred Astaire plays another variation on the hyperactive but charming persona he had perfected at RKO in the 30s.

Rita Hayworth is breathtakingly gorgeous and adorable.

Of course if you’re going to be Fred Astaire’s leading lady you’re going to have to be able not only to dance but dance superbly. And Rita Hayworth most certainly could dance. Astaire was apparently very impressed indeed by her dancing abilities. Their dances together are terrific. As usual her singing voice is dubbed.

And they have good chemistry. The main reason to see this movie is most definitely to see Astaire and Hayworth together. It is a pity they only made two movies together.

It’s all delightful but somehow it just can’t quite match the best of the Astaire Rogers musicals of the 30. RKO gave those movies a distinctive aesthetic (with a touch of fantasy) which this movie lacks. The settings look good but a bit generic. It doesn’t have the same magical flavour.

These minor quibbles aside this is a charming lightweight escapist musical. Recommended.

I don’t think it’s had a Blu-Ray release but the older DVD release looks fine.

Cover Girl (1944)

What ingredients do you need for a successful musical? You need songs, dancing, a few laughs, some romance and you need glamour. Columbia’s 1944 Technicolor musical extravaganza Cover Girl has all these elements. The songs are pretty good. The dancing is provided by Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly so it’s obviously top-notch. The comedy is provided by Phil Silvers and Eve Arden and it’s reasonably good. The romance angle works. And it has absolutely outrageous amounts of glamour. Cover Girl should work perfectly, and to a large extent it does.

The plot is your standard off-the-shelf backstage musical plot as used in countess other musicals. It doesn’t matter. This movie has more than enough going for it in every other department.

Rusty Parker (Rita Hayworth) and Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly) are a dancing team in Danny’s Brooklyn night club. Danny is grooming Rusty for stardom. It’s not something you can rush. Danny knows that if it happens too fast it won't last. You need patience and careful judgment. And then Rusty, more by accident than anything else, is picked as the cover girl for Vanity magazine’s 50th anniversary issue and it all starts happening much too fast. Maybe not too fast for Rusty, but too fast for Danny. Danny thought that he and Rusty would reach stardom together but now Rusty doesn’t need him. Which is a double blow since he’s madly in love with her.

It’s not that Rusty is selfish or ungrateful to Danny. She’s not that kind of girl. It’s just that opportunity has beckoned and she can’t very well say no to it. And before she knows what’s happening she’s on a roller-coaster road to fame and fortune and she couldn’t get off if she tried.

Vanity magazine publisher John Coudair (Otto Kruger) had had a disastrous romance with Rusty’s grandmother Maribelle forty years earlier and he wants to recapture his past by marrying Rusty. There are several flashback sequences, some successful and some less so, with Hayworth as Maribelle. Broadway impresario Noel Wheaton (Lee Bowman) is also after Rusty although whether he’s really in love with her or just sees her as a potential star who will make him a lot of money is open to debate. Sooner or later Rusty will have to make her choice.

In 1944 Gene Kelly was not yet a major star but he was ambitious. Not just ambitious for stardom. He and his co-choreographer Stanley Donen wanted to take the movie musical in new directions. Cover Girl is a sort of dry run for their later collaborations. They didn’t yet have enough clout to do exactly what they wanted but this film did give them the chance to put some of their ideas into practice. The famous sequence of Gene Kelly dancing with himself, trying to work through his fears and doubts, is a pointer to the future.

At this stage Rita Hayworth was a star but not yet in the top rank. Cover Girl would make her a very big star indeed. While Kelly is very good the movie belongs to Hayworth. She demonstrates her star quality in no uncertain terms.

Eve Arden is terrific and very funny as Coudair’s assistant. Phil Silvers is a matter of taste. I don’t mind him and in the 40s the hero in a movie like this had to have a comic sidekick.

This is an odd sort of musical. It’s an old-fashioned backstage musical trying rather tentatively to push the boundaries of the genre. The thin script is the main problem. It undermines the attempts to give the characters more psychological depth than was customary in a mid-40s musical.

The Region 4 DVD doesn’t have much in the way of extras, apart from a very brief but perceptive interview with Baz Luhrmann. It offers an excellent transfer. The colours look great.

Despite some weaknesses this is a must-see for Gene Kelly fans. The innovations he introduced to the genre are all here, albeit in embryo. And it’s a must-see for Rita Hayworth fans who want to see her at her most seductive. Cover Girl is highly recommended.

Down to Earth (1947)

Down to Earth is a 1947 Columbia musical starring Rita Hayworth. It’s not usually regarded as one of her great films, but we shall see.

It is very loosely a sequel to Here Comes Mr Jordan. Very very loosely. Down to Earth in turn apparently inspired the 1980 movie Xanadu (although I’ve never seen Xanadu so I don’t know how much of a connection there really is).

Here Comes Mr Jordan (based on the play Heaven Can Wait) deals with guardian angels and could rather tenuously be regarded be regarded as dealing with vaguely Christian themes. Throwing in pagan goddesses could be considered to be a daring move, or a foolhardy move (or possibly even blasphemous!) but audiences were used to Hollywood’s propensity for hopelessly jumbling up every subject it touched. It does make the plot completely absurd but it’s pretty absurd to begin with. Of course musicals have no need whatever for coherent plots so really it doesn’t matter at all.

Supernatural themes were quite popular in romantic comedies and musicals at the time. The premise of Down to Earth is that Broadway producer Danny Miller (Larry Parks) is putting on a show about the Muses and one of the actual muses, Terpsichore (Rita Hayworth), hears about it and is enraged that goddesses (or perhaps they’re actually demi-goddesses) should be treated in such a vulgar manner. She decides to come down to Earth to put a stop to this outrage.

Terpsichore manages, with great ease, to convince the show’s producer and star Danny Miller to cast her in the lead, as Terpsichore. She renames herself Kitty Pendleton and acquires kindly rather scatter-brained low-rent agent Max Corkle (James Gleason).

The problem is that Miller wants to appeal to the taste of the public (a taste that is beyond the comprehension of a goddess) while Terpsichore wants the show to be art. He wants vulgar cheerfulness while she wants seriousness and class. She manages to persuade him to completely rewrite the show and of course she then discovers that the public doesn’t want art, it wants cheerful vulgarity.

Terpsichore also arouses the hostility of Danny’s buddy and co-star Eddie (Marc Platt) although I must confess I have no idea why except that presumably it was felt that this hostility would add some spice to the story.

The songs are not all that fantastic. At best they’re adequate.

On the other hand the script does have some decent gags and the love story (I’m sure you won’t be surprised that Terpsichore and Danny fall in love) is handled reasonably well.

I’m not quite sure about Larry Parks. He’s not terrible, he’s an adequate enough leading man, he just doesn’t seem to have any real charisma. The chemistry with Hayworth is perhaps not all it could be.

Roland Culver takes over the rôle of Mr Jordan (played by Claude Rains in Here Comes Mr Jordan) and he does a fine job. Edward Everett Horton adds some fun (as he invariably does) as the ever-pessimistic heavenly messenger 7013.

The one massive selling point of this movie is Rita Hayworth. She looks gorgeous and her performance sparkles. She gets to do plenty of dancing and she gets to do some actual acting and she does both with style.

This is certainly a movie that looks good. It was shot in Technicolor and the budget was clearly fairly generous (by Columbia standards anyway). Some of the musical numbers are quite bizarre.

Down to Earth does at times get a bit ambitious, venturing into the dangerous waters of satire. It tries, in a low-key way, to satirise the vulgarity of popular culture and also the pomposity of high culture. Of course since it’s a Hollywood movie we’re never going to doubt that it will come down solidly on the side of enjoyable vulgarity.

The Region 4 DVD which I have is barebones but it’s a nice transfer with vibrant colours.

Down to Earth would have benefited from slightly better songs but overall it’s a fine effort with a touching love story and with Rita Hayworth in fine form. Harmless, lightweight but entertaining. Recommended.